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Story:The End of Eternity/EP
Prologue “What has humanity amounted to?” The cold words, sudden and whispered yet resonating in the otherwise quiet darkness, shook Wingef Teletov into a still shock. The Russian archaeologist, shaking with fear, looked around with bulging eyes and a sweating body. He patted at his forehead in a futile attempt to calm himself. “H-hello? Who goes there?” The heavenly voice did not respond. Teletov stood in place, gulped, and bent down to his knees once again. He picked up his fallen dusting brush and, looking over his shoulder once more, began to sweep at the floor once again. He contributed the voice to his partner, Kolbenik, who was supposed to be watching over the entrance of the cave they had discovered. Kolbenik was a mischevious man who loved playing tricks on his partner, and Teletov was used to them by now after years of working together with the younger Russian. Still, something about his current surroundings made the trick take special effect on the already superstitious Teletov. The two Russian scientists, met with mediocrity in their careers and both sharing a lust for glory and global recognition, had been working together for years, traveling the world and searching for the next historical discovery to turn the world on its head. They had been to the deserts of Mexico, the forests of Brazil, the arid wastes of Mongolia, and even the frigid banks of Antarctica, but were still met with failure when it came to reaching serious success. Their finds and paid work was enough to allow them both to survive, barely, but they agreed with each other on the fact that it was time for them to cash in on their ambitions and their abilities. After the Collapse, the world had been turned around and completely changed despite the advances that science and society went through every day. Trinkets, gadgets, and memorials of the Old World still existed everywhere, and were indeed abundant on the markets both clean and black, but for a modern-day archaeologist, being in the big leagues meant finding crucial artifacts from a long-gone era; artifacts that had somehow managed to stay out of the hands of people after the Collapse had finished. The last big find in the community, for example, was an old object originally used for communication, something completely absurd in the modern world. It was a large white phone with an antenna and a wired interface. These were the sort of absurd objects people looked for nowadays in hopes of becoming rich and famous, and these were what the two archaeologists were searching for, had been searching for, for years. But they had found nothing and it looked like they would only ever find nothing. That was then they had stumbled upon the mysterious cave in the far reaches of coastal Portugal. The tip had come from a mysterious informant, who had gotten his information from a tip from a distant friend, and so on. Everyone who heard the tale of the extremely old, recently discovered ‘man-made cavern’ in the Portuguese beaches had disregarded it as pointless fiction. Among many fallacies, they loved to point out the fact that Portugal was far from holding the very first human civilization, as the rumors suggested. And how could such a cavern really be hidden on beaches? Teletov and Kolbenik had taken the rumor as fact and set out to the Latin nation with haste. To them, every rumor and opportunity was a chance for success – and Teletov had the feeling that they had finally hit the jackpot. Kolbenik, who had been harboring doubts about the entire situation, was floored when the two arrived on the sandy shores and investigated the site. Amazingly, after a few days of scouring, traveling, and digging, they found a deep underground cave exactly as predicted. Indeed, the cave had all the makings of being artificial, and even had enough artifacts to justify being labeled as ancient. But what was so startling wasn’t the fact that the cave held clues of a previous civilization – that wasn’t rare at all anymore. What was baffling was that the cave held traces of existing in the world before the Collapse. In other words, this would have been an amazing archaeological find before the Collapse – which meant that it would be absolutely jaw-dropping if introduced today. The cave was more like a tunnel, and snaked on and on beneath the Portuguese hills. Teletov and Kolbenik had commissioned a small squad of Portuguese laborers to aid the two in their dig, but upon finding that the cave actually existed, Teletov was overcome with emotion and ambition. He began to rush through the area, checking every orifice and pulling every suspicious object with careful abandon. Kolbenik had decided to stay at the entrance so that he could flag down the Portuguese men and women they had called when they arrived, for the cave was subtly and deftly hidden. Less than an hour had passed before Teletov began to feel anxious about the discovery of his lifetime. Much earlier than anticipated, his light went out, plunging him in the murky darkness of the subterranean exhibit. Oddly, none of his three backup flashlights worked, and the air was so damp beneath the earth that he wasn’t about to strike a flame with a match. Not only that, but apparently he had gone farther underground than he thought, so much so that the walls must have been surrounded by water, for none of his communication signals were useful in the slightest. These days, any form of communication between two human beings were possible thanks to advanced devices and even cybernetic implants. The only drawback to these conveniences was the fact that they could not work below water; most forms of liquid interference reduced the communicating capabilities, with their advanced waves and forms of data router to data router transmissions - to null. In these cases, more traditional forms of transmitting messages – old fashioned radio waves – were needed. But because he had not expected a quandary of this magnitude, he had come unprepared to deal with this situation. Confused, logistically alone, and disoriented, Teletov found himself completely lost within seconds. He began to panic even sooner. It dawned on him within minutes that Kolbenik and the Portuguese would be coming to see him as soon as they had the chance, and he calmed down some. As soon as the light had faded and he found that his backup flashlights did not work, Teletov came to terms with his situation as well as his communication’s failures. He was truly and completely stranded. Still, in the midst of his crisis, Teletov was constantly overwhelmed by the significance of his and his friend’s find. The aging Russian had, in the past, dabbled with depression and cynicism when it came to his field, but suddenly all of his old passion and excitement for history had been rekindled. He had gotten to his knees and began to crawl among the wet ground, groping and brushing about for anything he could find that would be notable. Teletov began to think about what had just happened to him as he continued brushing. That voice he had heard, in hindsight, was very monotone and articulated with a confident staccato. The rhythm of the English – a language Teletov had been fluent in since his teens – was unusual, unnatural even. From his thirty plus years of hearing English spoken in every nation in the world, he had never heard it spoken like it was mere minutes ago. In other words, the phrase was nothing like Kolbenik’s slurred, meek English, which he had learned a mere year ago and was still shaky in. His theory was obviously and inarguably wrong. In addition, if the voice was indeed Kolbenik’s, or even one of the Portuguese men, why had they not shown themselves? Where were the flashlights and the noise of walking, excavating? Kolbenik may have enjoyed a harsh joke or two, but even he wasn’t foolish enough to indulge in pranks while on the job at such an important find. The more Teletov thought of the logical fallacies he had experienced, the more his body began to shake in pure fear, so he tried to suppress these urges. Even though the aging Russian believed firmly in the stories and tales he had been told by his scholarly father in the cold winter days of his childhood, and even though he never let them affect his professional life, he couldn’t help but be extremely afraid by the ominous aura of his situation. He was surrounded in extreme darkness in a place that humans hadn’t touched in thousands of years; who was to say what kind of traps may have persisted? What if the cave wasn’t structurally sound, and collapsed all around him as he worked? Even worse – what if there were other people in the cave, malicious entities who sought to rob him and his team? This was exactly what was causing Teletov to shake in fear, and he patted at his forehead once again and then rubbed his temples. There was no logic in these musings and Teletov lived his life by logic. He always had. There was no sense in not doing so, and Teletov was a sensible man. He heard a shuffling, and then a low groaning, as if gears somewhere were turning. The man froze and looked around in the darkness, but was still unable to see a thing. He whimpered and felt tears threatening to drip down his cheeks. “W-Who’s there?” Yet again came the churning, much louder this time. Teletov was stricken completely rigid by his horror and now openly wept. A footstep crunched on the dirt, and then another, before stopping. He repeated himself, this time in his native Russian, but was again met with a footstep and no answer. He was ready to scream before he heard the elusive voice once again. “What do you believe is to be the fate of humanity?” Although the voice was gentle and subtly slipped into his ears like snakes, it was this very diction that filled him with immediate revulsion and almost physical pain. The voice was disembodied and seemed to come from every angle and attacked him, not just in his ears but his brain. The Russian’s senses flared off in overload, alerting him with the presence of another, except the feeling came from everywhere around him. A sort of pressure took over the dark cavern and caused him to clench his eyes shut and cover his ears with his eyes, but he could still hear the voice resounding within him and he swore he could see its origin, would be able to even if his eyes were gouged out, everywhere and nowhere. The voice defied logic and seemed to spit on every principle of rational thought that Teletov’s universe held as law. It was a burning star of darkness that absorbed every particle of the man’s being and turned it into pure void. Once again the unknown figure spoke, sliding right into Teletov’s consciousness despite his ears being shut tightly. “Do you find that the stars have aligned for you, and do you believe you can bring this world to salvation?” Completely genderless and without aggression, the voice would have soothed any person in any situation besides this one. Something about the voice’s very existence struck Teletov to his core, eliciting a far greater response than it had any right to. Its enunciated words drifted and teased, touching and going; defying and manipulating. It spoke in a way that no human had ever spoken to him before, and it talked in bounds more than was actually spoken. He had experienced nothing like it before and never would again. As it was, Teletov was filled with increasingly strong waves of disgust and crippling fear, so much so that he began to violently stab his fingers into his ears and dig them further and further into his skull. “I don’t want to hear it! Leave me alone! Somebody, anybody, save me, please!” He screamed, not so much from the pain of his self-harm, but from his terror. If anything, the pain was a distraction, one that he welcomed even if it hurt him. No amount of pain would be as bad as what he felt from that voice. A footstep moved ever closer to Teletov, and the darkness seemed to become humanoid and embrace him, filling all of his being with a lack of light. He screamed even louder, the loudest he ever had, and ripped out the entirety of both his ear’s internal workings with his shaking fingers. The appendages hung off his head limply and blood spewed with reckless abandon from his head. The voice spoke to him again, and even though all of his hearing apparatuses had been viciously removed, Teletov could still hear the soothing words and could feel them resonating in his soul. “Can you bring the future to the present?” Suddenly everything was clear to Teletov, and he knew that he had to die. That was the only way for him to stop the voice and to escape the darkness. He didn’t know what he had done to deserve the act, nor what would happen to him when he died, but he knew that death was the destiny that was in store for him. Whatever he had discovered in the hidden cavern was something that he wasn’t meant to see. Like the others who had heard of the unnatural space, and even like his partner Kolbenik, Teletov knew that he should have exercised some form of restraint or hesitation when exploring. But it was too late now, and the hidden existence that had been tucked away for thousands of years was now free. It was reaching its deadly tentacles and its frightening words right into his heart, and he was not ready. Teletov suspected that there wasn’t a soul alive that was ready for the horror he felt in every inch of his existence. His hands, previously shaking and shuddering with every breath he took, now traveled to his neck swiftly and calmly. As he began to tear out his throat, the once grimacing face of Wingef Teletov brightened with a calm and completely honest smile. His pale white face, previously caked in dirt and now decorated with tears and smeared blood, loosened and all of his wrinkles disappeared. His throat quickly and brutally removed, the bloody and gasping Teletov finally opened his eyes as his hands began ripping and smashing at his spinal cord in the last seconds before death greeted him. Just as before, he looked into abyssal darkness, and just as before, he swore he could see every terrifying moment of the future looming before him in that darkness, taunting, reaching, waiting. He smiled even harder because he knew that future did not involve him. Wingef Teletov died with a smile. The body of the archaeologist slumped over and continued to bleed over the wet dirt of the cavern for a few moments before turning completely still. The humanoid before him and the origin of the voice stopped walking forward and simply looked at the corpse. With a whisper that was heard by no one, the figure disappeared. When Kolbenik and the Portuguese workers finally stumbled upon Teletov’s body some hours later, they were met only with confusion and a vague sense of despair.